I'm afraid I've rather lost track of this thread. Would someone care to summarise, on a wiki page perhaps?
I think the story is:
* Inspired by Nick's idea, Iavor and Pedro have converged on a single, type-family-based style for defining singletons.
* This style no longer requires Any to be a data type, so I can turn it back into a type family, which is a Good Thing because it paves the way for an eta rule. RSVP and I'll do that.
* Iavor mutters about sketchiness, but I'm not sure what that means specifically.
* I'm not sure how, it at all, it affects Richard's singletons paper
Simon
From: Iavor Diatchki [mailto:diatchki at galois.com]
Sent: 12 October 2012 21:11
To: Richard Eisenberg
Cc: Nicolas Frisby; Simon Peyton-Jones; Stephanie Weirich; Conor McBride; glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
Subject: Re: PolyKind issue in GHC 7.6.1rc1: How to make a kind a functional dependency?
Hello,
(summary: I think Nick's idea works for what's in GHC.TypeLits, and it would allow us to switch from `Any` as a constructor to `Any` as a function.)
On 10/11/2012 08:47 PM, Richard Eisenberg wrote:
Iavor and I collaborated on the design of the building blocks of singleton types, as we wanted our work to be interoperable. A recent scan through TypeLits tells me, though, that somewhere along the way, our designs diverged a bit. Somewhere on the to-do list is to re-unify the interfaces, and actually just to import TypeLits into Data.Singletons so the definitions are one and the same. Iavor, I'm happy to talk about the details if you are.
The module GHC.TypeLits hasn't really changed much since last we talked (the Nat1 type is new, but that's only for working with type-level naturals and unrelated to this discussion). I added the SingE class so that my work is compatible with Richard's (a simple newtype suffices if we are only interested in working with singletons for type-level literals). So we should certainly make the two compatible again, let me know what needs to change.
I was just playing around with Nick's idea and here is my version of the code, which loads fine (but as I discuss in point 2 bellow I think it is a bit sketchy...)
import GHC.TypeLits hiding (SingE(..), Kind)
import qualified GHC.TypeLits as Old
data Kind (k :: *) -- discuessed in point 2 bellow
class SingE (any :: Kind k) rep | any -> rep where
fromSing :: Sing (a :: k) -> rep
instance SingE (any :: Kind Nat) Integer where
fromSing = Old.fromSing
instance SingE (any :: Kind Symbol) String where
fromSing = Old.fromSing
I think that there are two interesting points about this code:
1. It is important that the instances are polymorphic because this tells GHC that it is allowed to use the instance in any context as long as the kinds match, regardless of the actual type. Note that this is not
the case if we write the instance using the singleton member of the proxy kind:
data KindProxy (k :: *) = KindProxy
instance SingE ('KindProxy :: KindProxy Nat) Integer where
fromSing (SNat n) = n
Such instances would only work if GHC could see that the type is 'KindProxy so if we have a type variable of the correct kind, the instance would not reduce. This is related to the eta-expansion issue---if we eliminated `Any`, then GHC could perform a kind-based improvement to deduce that the type variable must be equal to `KindProxy`, because this is the only type with the correct kind.
2. As Nick noticed, we are not doing any fancy type computing in the class, so we don't actually need any KindProxy elements---we are just doing overloading based on a kind rather than a type. To emphasize this I made Kind an empty type/kind and GHC is still happy: instances are resolved as intended. But... `Kind` has no elements so what are the instances applied to? The only reason this works is that GHC has defaulted the instances to use `Any`. To me this seems a bit sketchy.
So what to do? Changing the code in this style (using the normal non-empty proxy) makes sense because I think that it would allow us to change `Any` into a type function rather than a type constructor, like Simon did and un-did recently. The reason I think this will work is because now there will be no uses of `Any` in the definitions of the instances, it will only appear in the uses of the instances.
Furthermore, I think it makes sense for GHC to check that for each use of the type function `Any`, the kind where it is used is non-empty. I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement that, so maybe we can deal with it later.
-Iavor
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